Aspects of Historical Poetics and Pragmatics of Slavic Charms

Abstract

Although traditional verbal charms and incantation rituals have received extensive attention in Slavic ethnolinguistics and folklore studies, the need still exists for a more in-depth poetic and contextual (re)analysis of ritual texts, especially of the interrelation between their stylistic, compositional, referential and functional properties. In this context, the article points towards the possible benefits of an integrated pragmatic and (ethno)poetic text analysis that centers on the semiotic concepts of iconicity and indexicality. Through an examination of a number of South and East Slavic samples the authors discuss the various ways in which poetic and figurative stylization and structuring in verbal charms correlates (indexically and iconically) with their meanings and functions within the performative (actional-ritual) and broader sociocultural context. In doing so, they attempt to demonstrate how an analysis along poetic-pragmatic lines may prove fruitful for the revalorization of the poetic, performative, social, and cultural efficacy of charms and incantations as verbal rituals, and hence for a recovery of the sociocultural “memory” of these ritual texts. Traditional verbal charms and incantation rituals have received extensive attention in Slavic ethnolinguistics and folklore studies as regards their typological, morphological, structural, semantic, and pragmatic aspects.(1) At the same time, the need still exists for a more in-depth poetic and contextual (re)analysis of ritual folk texts, in particular of the interrelation between their stylistic, compositional, referential, and functional properties. Commenting on a renewed interest in the poetics of magical folk texts, folklorist Viktor Gusev, for example, has pleaded for the collaborative folkloristic, linguistic, and anthropological study of the “aesthetic essence” of folklore forms in connection with their functions [Gusev 1998: 365-366; see also Ajdacic 1994]. Slavic ethnolinguists, for their part, have long acknowledged the